For those Silicon Valleyites weary of traveling to Las Vegas for re:Invent, Encore Media Group brought its Blockchain Expo/IoT Expo/AI Expo combo conference to Santa Clara this week.

The combination of three of the most hyped topics in technology today provided a rare opportunity to compare the progress vendors have been making cutting through the noise to bring real solutions to the market.

While clearly not representative of all participants in their respective areas, the vendors in attendance nevertheless helped to underscore the essence of each market segment.

For example, among the artificial intelligence (AI) vendors at the expo, the center of gravity was image recognition – one of the primary use cases for deep learning, a subset of AI.

For the Internet of Things (IoT), the excitement centered on hardware devices of various sorts, including sensors and actuators for all manner of industries. There were even Japanese and South Korean pavilions, showcasing the wares from the respective countries’ manufacturers.

The center of gravity for blockchain, however, didn’t fare as well. Various cryptocurrency-centered startups gamely made their pitches, largely to each other. The dramatic deflation of the bitcoin speculative bubble combined with increasing regulatory and legal action against the scammers who have taken over the crypto world made attendees generally skeptical about the entire affair.

Smart city display at IoT ExpoJason Bloomberg

Gems in the Rough

Computer vision, IoT devices, and crypto, however, are tangential to my enterprise tech beat at best. Fortunately, there were a handful of vendors with bona fide enterprise value propositions. Here are my picks.

Within the AI conference the most interesting vendor wasn’t even an AI vendor per se, although machine learning was an important part of its offering.

Knowi provides an analytics platform that replaces traditional extract, transform, and load (ETL) capabilities with a simple query builder that works in parallel across both relational and NoSQL databases.

Within the IoT part of the expo, the enterprise-focused standout was Progress DataRPM. This platform provides asset behavior analysis using machine learning. Such assets could be anything the organization wishes to track, but DataRPM is particularly well suited for IoT assets. For example, it detects and predicts anomalies and delivers machine health insights.

DataRPM enables asset-intensive organizations to control the torrent of sensor data coming from every device. It analyzes both time series data and other types of data like customer data, thus providing broader applicability than similar tools that only focus on time series data.

The Blockchain Standouts

Peel back the crypto nonsense and a handful of blockchain platform vendors stood out as offering (or at least, potentially offering) real value to enterprises.

I’ve written about two of these standouts before. The platform from Boardwalktech offers transaction chaining, helping companies keep track of how individual values change within complex multiparty transactions. At the expo the company was also talking about its ability to provide inferencing around transactions using machine learning.

The platform from Gospel Technology helps enterprises with security and infrastructure consolidation. The company was touting how a UK-based telecommunications customer is using Gospel’s platform to manage SIM cards in IoT devices, and how a customer in the pharmaceutical industry was leveraging the platform for complex inventory management.

In amongst the startups was enterprise software behemoth SAP, represented by two guys in a small booth as though they were a scrappy new entrant to the market. These two fellows were most interested in speaking to existing
SAP customers about how the vendor is bringing its HyperLedger-based blockchain solutions to industry groups in high tech, life sciences/pharma, and consumer packaged goods/retail/agriculture industries.

The one unfamiliar enterprise blockchain vendor worth mentioning was Insolar, which is working on a blockchain platform that will offer variable permissioning and policy-based domains where only some nodes process transactions.

Both of these capabilities are fascinating innovations, as they can potentially resolve challenging issues with consensus and scalability that plague existing blockchain approaches. The company is currently in beta with an expected launch in mid-2019.

The Common Theme: Data

It may seem that AI, IoT, and Blockchain are three disparate corners of the tech world – but when it comes to the enterprise solutions I featured here, there is an obvious common thread: data.

Data, of course, are the lifeblood of every enterprise, so it’s no wonder that data form the underlying conduit of business value across the various disruptive trends on display at the expo.

My advice: stop focusing on the overhyped terminology that plagues today’s technology world. Business value should always be your central concern, and data are often the key to such value.

Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Boardwalktech and Progress Software are current Intellyx customers, and SAP is a former Intellyx customer. None of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. The author does not own, nor does he intend to own, any cryptocurrency or other cryptotokens, neither long nor short. Encore Media Group provided a free pass to Blockchain Expo to Jason Bloomberg, a standard industry practice. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.